Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [230]
Money was of little concern to Ralph. When he shopped for his fiancée’s engagement ring, he felt compelled to buy one costing $5,300. He told his father that the only other choice, which was half the price, “was a very commonplace emerald which would not have born a triumphant comparison with the rings she already has.” Both parents made plans to attend the wedding, unlike Ralph’s college graduation. At the end of September, Kate returned to the United States after a long stay at the French baths. She felt disconnected. “With the world in which we must live,” she wrote to a friend, “the longer we stay out of it the harder it is for one to pick up the broken strands.”
On October 14, 1905, on one of the few occasions since Lucille’s death seven years earlier, the entire Pulitzer family gathered to celebrate Ralph’s wedding to Frederica Webb in Shelburne, Vermont. The Webbs’ plans for the wedding—a union of two of New York’s most prominent families—were all that one might expect. The hamlet of Shelburne had seen nothing like it before. A few lucky locals received coveted invitations. In nearby Burlington, reported one newspaper, “every dressmaker in the city is busy into the night preparing the costumes of the favored one.”
On the morning of the ceremony, a special train, ten cars long, brought guests from New York. Those attending the ceremony reached the little Trinity Episcopal Church in carriages with horses festooned in white chrysanthemums. Kate and the bride’s mother, both dressed in white satin with white hats, entered together. Ralph stood at the altar with Joe, who was his best man, while their father sat in a pew. Boys from New York’s St. Thomas Church sang as the bridal party processed.
For a brief moment the wedding purged Joseph of his pained complaints about his children, particularly his boys. He became teary-eyed as Ralph and Frederica exchanged vows. It was a rare moment of sentimentality and affection for him. Ralph was similarly ashamed to show emotion in public. “I looked at you as we walked down the aisle,” Ralph later told his father, “in fact, yours was the only face I saw, and I felt a lot of things that I probably would not have been able to express to you.” This was as close as the Pulitzer men came to expressing affection.
The father expressed his pleasure in the only way he knew. He bought Ralph a house—adjacent to his own in New York—and wrote a large check for the honeymoon. But by the end of Ralph and Frederica’s tour of Europe, Joseph was his normal self again. “Your allowance has been stopped,” he wrote to Ralph, “and the only thing you will get is your salary. Salaries, by the way, are not paid in advance.”
Early in 1906, Pulitzer learned that after all the effort to get Joe into Harvard, the school and his son were a poor match. Joe cut classes, idled away hours enjoying lunches and quiet spells by the fireplace of a fraternity house, and overspent his allowance. Summoned to New York in February, Joseph threatened to pull Joe out of Harvard unless he changed his ways. He didn’t, and his father was true to his word.
Joseph decided that Joe’s lessons would be better taught in the newsroom and that his new teacher would be Charles Chapin of the Evening World, the most accomplished and feared city editor who had ever worked on Park Row. Chapin was already legendary by 1906; a dozen years later he would murder his wife, and thereafter he would spend the rest of his life in Sing Sing prison, tending acres of magnificent rose gardens of his own making. At Pulitzer’s Evening World, Chapin was unbeatable in the guerrilla warfare of Yellow Journalism; he was also a newsroom tyrant who fired reporters